Ann Arbor Area Community News

A friend alerted me of the email storm happening on the umich email servers. What that means is that a person sent out an email to a bunch of unmoderated email groups.

Then, one by one, people reply to all, sometimes unknowingly, asking to be taken off the list. Then email do-gooders reply to all about how to respond to these types of emails. Then people respond frustrated, then… then… then you have people bet on how long it will last.

There was a better email storm stared by a staff employee at the College of Engineering a few years ago. Better because it was a completely naively started email storm. It was supposed to go out to women and minority engineering students, and ended up going to damn near everybody. After one man responded with a mildly racist tone, people started replying to each other instead of just “take me off the list”. And then it started getting creative – tracking down the address of the woman who started it all, a Dr. Seuss-style poem on the whole damn thing, advice-column questions, philosophical musings about the whole thing, rants towards the computer engineer students who should’ve known the stupidity in replying “take me off the list, I can’t stand all this stupid email” to the entire list… eventually it got cut short.

However, it also happened during midterms-or-finals week, and was the best damn distraction ever. Had a thermodynamics test the next day, and we all ended up rehashing the best email-storm moments instead of worrying about the test. Good times.